English Language Teaching Practice PDF

Contents 1 The world of English language teaching ○ 1.1 Who speaks English? 1 1.1.1 Varieties of English ○ 1.2 Who learns English, and which variety do they learn? 4 1.2.1 General English and ESP 1.2.2 Business English 1.2.3 Content-based language teaching (CBLT) and CLIL ○ 1.3 Who teaches English? 9 2 Describing the English language ○ 2.1 What we want to say 14 2.1.1 Form and meaning 2.1.2 Purpose ○ 2.2 Appropriacy and register 17 ○ 2.3 Language as text and discourse 18 2.3.1 Discourse organisation 2.3.2 Genre ○ 2.4 Grammar 21 2.4.1 Choosing words for grammar 2.4.2 Some important grammatical concepts ○ 2.5 Lexis 25 2.5.1 Word meaning 2.5.2 Extending word use 2.5.3 Word combinations ○ 2.6 The sounds of the language 28 2.6.1 Pitch 2.6.2 Intonation 2.6.3 Individual sounds 2.6.4 Sounds and spelling 2.6.5 Stress ○ 2.7 Speaking and writing 34 ○ 2.8 Paralinguistics 36 2.8.1 Vocal paralinguistic features 2.8.2 Physical paralinguistic features 3 Issues in language learning ○ 3.1 What research offers 41 3.1.1 The mind is a computer 3.1.2 Explicit and implicit knowledge 3.1.3 Language is forming habits 3.1.4 Language is communication 3.1.5 Language is grammar; language is vocabulary 3.1.6 The role of other languages (translation) 3.1.7 Learning is about people ○ 3.2 Making sense of it all 52 4 Popular methodology ○ 4.1 Approach, method, procedure, technique 54 ○ 4.2 Three and a half methods 55 ○ 4.3 Communicative language teaching 57 4.3.1 Teaching‘unplugged’ ○ 4.4 Task-based learning 60 ○ 4.5 The lexical approach 62 ○ 4.6 Four old humanistic methods 64 ○ 4.7 A procedure (presentation, practice and production) 65 ○ 4.8 Which method? What approach? 68 4.8.1 What teachers do 4.8.2 Post-method and learning culture ○ 4.9 Coursebooks and other materials 71 4.9.1 For and against coursebook use 4.9.2 How to use coursebooks 4.9.3 Using coursebooks more effectively 4.9.4 Choosing coursebooks 4.9.5 Designing our own materials ○ 4.10 Looking forward 77 5 Being learners ○ 5.1 The age factor 80 5.1.1 Young learners iii 5.1.2 Teenagers 5.1.3 Adults ○ 5.2 Learner differences 86 5.2.1 Learner styles ○ 5.3 Motivation 89 5.3.1 Understanding the nature of motivation 5.3.2 What affects motivation? 5.3.3 What teachers can do about student motivation ○ 5.4 Levels 94 5.4.1 From beginner to advanced 5.4.2 The CEFR levels 5.4.3 Other frameworks of language proficiency ○ 5.5 Learner autonomy 97 5.5.1 Learner training/strategy training 5.5.2 Autonomy tasks 5.5.3 Open learning, self-access centres and student ‘helpers’ 5.5.4 Provoking student choice 5.5.5 Outside the classroom 5.5.6 Homework 5.5.7 All in the mind 6 Being teachers ○ 6.1 Qualities of a good teacher 113 6.1.1 The magic of rapport 6.1.2 Inside the classroom ○ 6.2 Roles that teachers ‘play’ 116 6.2.1 Talking to students 6.2.2 The teacher as a teaching ‘aid’ ○ 6.3 What teachers do next 120 6.3.1 Teachers on their own 6.3.2 Teachers with others 6.3.3 Different ways of observing and being observed 6.3.4 The big wide world 7 Class size and different abilities ○ 7.1 Class size: two extremes 136 7.1.1 Large classes 7.1.2 Teaching one-to-one ○ 7.2 Managing mixed ability 143 7.2.1 Working with different content 7.2.2 Different student actions 7.2.3 What the teacher does 7.2.4 Special educational needs (SENs) 7.2.5 Realistic mixed-ability teaching 8 Feedback, mistakes and correction ○ 8.1 Giving supportive feedback 154 ○ 8.2 Students make mistakes 155 ○ 8.3 Correction decisions 156 8.3.1 What to correct 8.3.2 When to correct 8.3.3 Who corrects and who should be corrected? 8.3.4 What to do about correction ○ 8.4 Correcting spoken English 158 8.4.1 Online (on-the-spot) correction 8.4.2 Offline (after-the-event) correction ○ 8.5 Giving feedback for writing 161 8.5.1 Giving feedback in process writing 8.5.2 Using correction symbols 8.5.3 Alternatives to correction symbols 8.5.4 Letting the students in 8.5.5 What happens next 8.5.6 Burning the midnight oil 9 Managing for success ○ 9.1 Why problems occur 168 ○ 9.2 Creating successful classrooms 170 9.2.1 Behaviour norms 9.2.2 Teaching for success ○ 9.3 Dealing with problems 173 10 Seating and grouping students ○ 10.1 Whole-class teaching 177 10.1.1 Seating whole-group classes ○ 10.2 Students on their own 180 ○ 10.3 Pairs and groups 181 10.3.1 Pairwork 10.3.2 Groupwork 10.3.3 Ringing the changes ○ 10.4 Organising pairwork and groupwork 183 10.4.1 Making it work 10.4.2 Creating pairs and groups 10.4.3 Procedures for pairwork and groupwork 10.4.4 Troubleshooting iv 11 Technology for learning ○ 11.1 What is on offer? 192 11.1.1 Internet connectivity ○ 11.2 Technology issues 196 11.2.1 Digital divides 11.2.2 Digital literacy 11.2.3 Who does what? 11.2.4 Six questions ○ 11.3 Using classroom resources 201 ○ 11.4 Blended learning, flipped classrooms and beyond 204 11.4.1 Blended learning 11.4.2 The flipped classroom 11.4.3 SOLEs ○ 11.5 Learning online 206 12 Planning ○ 12.1 Planning paradoxes 210 ○ 12.2 Thinking about lessons 211 ○ 12.3 Designing lessons 214 ○ 12.4 Making a formal plan 216 12.4.1 Background elements 12.4.2 Describing procedure and materials ○ 12.5 Planning a sequence of lessons 221 12.5.1 Projects and threads ○ 12.6 Planning CLIL lessons 225 13 Teaching language construction ○ 13.1 Studying structure and use 228 13.1.1 Language study in lesson sequences 13.1.2 Choosing study activities 13.1.3 Known or unknown language ○ 13.2 Explain and practise 231 13.2.1 Explaining things 13.2.2 Practice (accurate reproduction) ○ 13.3 Meet, need and practise 235 ○ 13.4 Discover and practise 235 ○ 13.5 Research and practise 237 ○ 13.6 Review and recycle 238 14 Teaching grammar ○ 14.1 Introducing grammar 239 ○ 14.2 Discovering grammar 246 ○ 14.3 Practising grammar 248 ○ 14.4 Grammar games 253 15 Teaching vocabulary ○ 15.1 Introducing vocabulary 258 ○ 15.2 Practising vocabulary 264 ○ 15.3 Vocabulary games 269 ○ 15.4 Using dictionaries 271 15.4.1 When students use dictionaries 15.4.2 Dictionary activities ○ 15.5 Keeping vocabulary notebooks and cards 275 16 Teaching pronunciation ○ 16.1 What is good pronunciation? 277 ○ 16.2 Pronunciation problems 278 ○ 16.3 Phonemic symbols: to use or not to use? 280 ○ 16.4 When to teach pronunciation 281 ○ 16.5 Pronunciation and the individual student 282 ○ 16.6 Pronunciation sequences 283 16.6.1 Working with sounds 16.6.2 Working with stress 16.6.3 Working with intonation and stress 16.6.4 Sounds and spelling 16.6.5 Connected speech and fluency 17 Teaching language skills ○ 17.1 Skills together 297 17.1.1 Input and output 17.1.2 Integrating skills 17.1.3 Language skills, language construction 17.1.4 Integrating skill and language work 17.1.5 Top-down and bottom-up ○ 17.2 Receptive skills 302 17.2.1 A procedure for teaching receptive skills 17.2.2 The language issue 17.2.3 Comprehension tasks ○ 17.3 Productive skills 307 17.3.1 A procedure for teaching productive skills 17.3.2 Structuring discourse 17.3.3 Interacting with an audience 17.3.4 Dealing with difficulty 17.3.5 What to do about language ○ 17.4 Projects 311 17.4.1 Managing projects v 18 Reading ○ 18.1 Intensive reading 314 18.1.1 The vocabulary question 18.1.2 Analytical reading (text mining) ○ 18.2 Reading aloud 318 ○ 18.3 Extensive reading 319 ○ 18.4 Reading sequences 321 19 Listening ○ 19.1 Skills and strategies 336 19.1.1 Top-down listening 19.1.2 Bottom-up listening ○ 19.2 Extensive listening 339 ○ 19.3 Live listening/recorded listening 340 19.3.1 Live listening 19.3.2 Pre-recorded audio ○ 19.4 Using film and video 343 19.4.1 Viewing and listening techniques ○ 19.5 Listening (and film) sequences 345 ○ 19.6 The sound of music 357 20 Writing ○ 20.1 Literacies 360 20.1.1 Handwriting 20.1.2 Spelling 20.1.3 Layout and punctuation 20.1.4 Text construction ○ 20.2 Approaches to student writing 363 20.2.1 Process and product 20.2.2 Genre ○ 20.3 Creative writing 366 ○ 20.4 Writing as a collaborative activity 367 ○ 20.5 Building the writing habit 367 ○ 20.6 Writing-for-learning, writing-for-writing 369 ○ 20.7 The roles of the teacher 369 ○ 20.8 Writing sequences 370 ○ 20.9 Dictation activities 379 ○ 20.10 Portfolios and journals 381 21 Speaking ○ 21.1 Spoken language 384 ○ 21.2 Students and speaking 385 21.2.1 Reluctant students ○ 21.3 Speaking repetition 387 ○ 21.4 Speaking activity types 388 21.4.1 Acting from scripts 21.4.2 Communication games 21.4.3 Discussion 21.4.4 Prepared talks and presentations 21.4.5 Questionnaires 21.4.6 Simulation and role-play 21.4.7 Storytelling ○ 21.5 Speaking sequences 393 ○ 21.6 Making recordings 404 21.6.1 Getting everyone involved 22 Testing and evaluation ○ 22.1 Summative and formative assessment 408 ○ 22.2 Qualities of a good test 409 22.2.1 Washback ○ 22.3 Types of test 410 ○ 22.4 Test item types 412 22.4.1 Some typical test item types 22.4.2 Skill-focused tests 22.4.3 Young learner test item types ○ 22.5 Writing and marking tests 417 22.5.1 Writing tests 22.5.2 Marking tests ○ 22.6 Teaching for tests 421 GLOBAL SCALE of English The Global Scale of English is a standardised, granular scale from 10 to 90, which measures English language proficiency. Visit English.com/gse to learn more. The Global Scale of English logo appears throughout this book next to activities, accompanied by a number representing a level on the scale. vi Video contents Teachers at work Introduction For the fifth edition of The Practice of English Language Teaching, we decided to take a film crew out to see what English language lessons look like in different places, in different situations and, crucially, with different age groups. And so we asked a number of teachers if they would let us film them at work, doing one of their ‘normal’ lessons. With that in mind, we went to Ankara in Turkey and filmed two teachers, Ash Nilüfer Usluel and Emel Atasoy, working with young learners. In the UK, we filmed at a residential summer school in the city of Oxford. Varinder Unlu and John Duthie taught teenagers from a variety of different countries and different language backgrounds. Back in Turkey, we had the chance to record lessons (taught by Zeynep Büyüktuna and Çiğdem Özen) for adult Turkish students who were getting ready to study at an English-medium university. In Mexico, at a private language school, we had the good fortune to film teachers Juan Pablo Monfón Jiménez, Ricardo Fajardo Cortés and Araceli Menchaca Sánchez with their adult Mexican students. In each case, after the lesson, I was able to interview the teachers on camera so that I could ask them about their lessons and about the issues that came up as a result of their teaching choices. General description On Teachers at work you will see eight videos of the lessons that we filmed, together with conversations with the teachers who taught them. The videos vary in length for a number of reasons: in the first place, there is a limit to how much material will fit onto one DVD, and so we had to think carefully about the things we really wanted viewers to see and which parts of the interviews (see below) to include. However, we also wanted to give an idea of how whole lessons progressed and so, in each case, there is an explanation of what happens before and after the excerpts that you can see. After each lesson the teacher concerned was interviewed on camera. As a result – and where it is appropriate – there are extracts from these interviews interspersed between, before or after the footage of the classes we recorded. Together with the lesson videos there are also two ‘documentaries’ about, firstly, the use of the L1 in the classroom and, secondly, the kinds of classroom technology and aids which we found the teachers using. Using Teachers at work ‘Things to look out for’, in the detailed contents list below, can be used to cross reference parts of different chapters in the book which deal with the issues that come up on the DVD. Readers can look for the topics on the contents pages (pages ii-v) or consult the index. They can then watch the video(s) in question to prepare themselves to read about the topic. For example, they could watch Ricardo’s lesson (see below) before reading Chapter 10 on grouping students. Alternatively, they can watch the video during or after their discussions about the contents of the chapter. vii For each video in Teachers at work there is a worksheet of tasks on the website which accompanies this book: www.pearsonelt.com/PracticeofEnglishLanguageTeaching. You will also be able to see the teachers’ original lesson plans online. However, you can also react to what you see in the four more general ways below. Some of these activities can be done individually, but it is usually more productive to take part in them with colleagues. Activity A, in particular, requires collaboration. A. Friend or foe? In this activity, one viewer is a ‘friend’ and should say what is good about what they are seeing. The other is a ‘foe’ and should (pretend to) identify as many ‘holes’ as he or she can find in what is on show. Who ‘wins’ the discussion? B. Same or different? How different are you from the teachers you watch? In what ways is the situation that you teach in similar to, or different from, what you see in the videos? What does this make you think about a) your teaching and b) your teaching situation? C. How would I do it? If you had to teach the same students and you were doing the same kind of lesson, how would you do it? D. What can I steal? What techniques and activities can you ‘steal’ from the teachers on the video to use in your lessons? Detailed contents Table description The table has three columns and eleven rows. The column headings are Track, General Description and Things to look out for. The rows represent Track/Time. Trac General description Things to look out for k 1 Introduction – Jeremy Harmer 3:10 2 Young learners 1 Teacher for today (starting a (A2/elementary) Asli lesson) 15:3 (Turkey) 0 Using vocabulary in grammatical Contents: patterns Vocabulary (revision Vocabulary memory techniques and learning): Grammar Matching/mingling activity 3 Young learners 2 Choral repetition (A2/elementary) 19:5 Categorising vocabulary Emel (Turkey) 9 Circle drill Contents: Vocabulary (revision, Jumbled paragraph reading categorisation): Grammar; Reading Jazz chants Groupwork and pairwork 4 Teenagers 1 (B1 Warmer (vocabulary game) /intermediate) John 38:4 Mime (UK) 2 Vocabulary elicitation Contents: Storytelling (past ‘Hangman’ tense): Pronunciation Story reconstruction Pronunciation teaching ‘Charades’ Groupwork 5 Teenagers 2 Warmer (word game) 15:5 (B2 Using homemade audio 4 /upper-intermediate) Creative group activity Varinder (UK) Using ‘traditional’ classroom aids Contents: Students in groups Vocabulary: Listening: Creative group project 6 Pre-university adults ‘Hot seat’ focus on one student 1 (B1 / 8:05 Unusual way of ‘planting’ pre-intermediate) questions Zeynep (Turkey) Comparing answers in pairs Contents: Student ‘interview’: Reading comprehension with true/ false questions 7 Pre-university adults Paragraph construction 2 (B2 / 9:28 Jumbled paragraph upper-intermediate) Pairwork Çiğdem (Turkey) Using an overhead projector Contents: EAP (OHP) paragraph construction and writing 8 Adults 1 (B1 Live listening /intermediate) 20:0 Using pictures as a 5 Pablo (Mexico) comprehension task Contents: Listening: Using the board Grammar Pairwork and groupwork True/false grammar activity 9 Adults 2 Warmer (B2/upper-intermedia 24:3 Prediction and guessing te) 9 Different (changing) student Ricardo (Mexico) groupings Content: A Using mobile devices content-based ‘CLIL’ lesson Group discussion 10 Documentary 1 Asli, Araceli, Ricardo and Zeynep discuss the use (or non-use) of the 12:1 Using the L1 in the students’ mother tongue/home 5 classroom language in English language teaching 11 Documentary 2 Video excerpts of teachers using a range of classroom equipment, including the board, pictures, 11:39 What teachers use in charts, flipchart (paper), masks, strips of paper, the classroom posters, magazine cutouts, glue, computer projection and mobile devices viii Acknowledgments I want to express the profound gratitude that Pearson and I feel for all the people who were involved in the making of the DVD that goes with this book. First among these, of course, are the teachers who invited us into their classrooms. Their enthusiasm and ‘bravery under fire’ was something we will always be grateful for. I cannot thank them enough. Varinder Unlu facilitated our visit to the International House summer school in Oxford, UK – and then went on to allow us to film her! Özlem Atalay and Pelin Işin at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Turkey helped to arrange everything for us there, and Grant Kempton’s participation was invaluable. At International House in Mexico City, Ariel Lopez and Emma Ford made everything possible in the most incredible way. For our three visits, Mark Tuffnell directed the film shoots and, as a result, things went remarkably smoothly. He is a joy to work with. But the DVD would never have come together if it had not been for the organisation, editing, support, enthusiasm and professionalism of Katy Wright. Working with her again has been, as always, a complete joy. And without Luis Espana’s wise counsel and organisation, we would never have reached the finishing line. ix Introduction When The Practice of English Language Teaching was first published, more than thirty years ago, most teachers used chalkboards, and the overhead projector was still a novelty in some English language classrooms. There weren’t many photocopiers around, and the only things that projectors projected were photographic slides. Back then, if we wanted our students to do projects or find out any information, they would have to go to libraries and look in paper encyclopaedias. But it’s all different now. Students can research anything, listen to anything or watch anything on the internet whenever we want them to. They don’t even have to go anywhere special to do it. They can use their tablet computers or their mobile phones; we can call up the internet on a smartboard/interactive whiteboard right in front of their eyes! Which just goes to show that everything has changed. Or has it? It is true, of course, that modern classroom technology is vastly more sophisticated than it was all those years ago. This is reflected in the way that the chapter on learning technology (Chapter 11) has changed over the last few editions of this book. But the fundamental questions of language learning and teaching are still, it seems to me, the same, however we dress them up with the latest classroom technologies at our disposal; can we persuade learners to take charge of their own learning? What is the value (if any) of explicit language instruction as compared to, say, getting students to ‘absorb’ language through meaningful activities and texts? How useful is repetition? And what about teaching itself? Is it an art or a science? Or should we perhaps see it as a craft? And so on. These are the questions which this fifth edition of The Practice of English Language Teaching, like its four predecessors, intends to answer. It is informed not only by what went before, but also by the articles and books that have been written in the last eight years and which have, for example, highlighted a renewed interest in repetition, the use of translation, the lingua franca core, teaching ‘unplugged’ and the rise of digital testing and marking, amongst many other themes. You will find all that here, together with numerous contemporary examples of teaching activities for language systems and language skills. This fifth edition would never have seen the light of day without the support of Pietro Alongi, for which I am extremely grateful. Laurence Delacroix has guided it through the tortuous road to publication, and without Alice Willoughby, such a thing would not have come to pass. Thanks to them. At the beginning, though, the ‘dream team’ of Katy Wright and Helena Gomm got the ball rolling. And it was through the long months of research and writing (and editing and all the other processes that writers go through) that Helena’s wisdom, expertise and support as the book’s editor were absolutely crucial. This is the fifth project we have worked on together and I, for one, hope there will be many more! Thanks are also due to Ali Aljufri, James Belcher, Anthony Gaughan, Leila Nucci, Carol Lethaby, Leandra Dias, Ping Yang, Sung-Hee Lee, Phil Bird, Linda Hubbard, Lidia Cordoba and Maria Greenaway who wrote reports (or were interviewed) about the last edition to kick-start ourthinking x about what needed to be done so that ‘PELT 5’ would reflect contemporary concerns and realities. And then there are the hundreds – maybe thousands – of people whose thinking and teaching practices are reflected in the pages of this book. They are not just the writers of the many articles and books that are mentioned in these pages, but also the teachers whose talks I have attended at conferences or seen at work in classrooms; the participants in the endless (but always fascinating) discussions, both formal and informal, that happen in those places, and the authors of the great flowering of postings about our world that has taken place on various social media since the last edition of this book. And what a world it is! A world where we need to communicate more and perhaps shout and fight less. And that’s where language teachers come in. For what better calling is there than to help people understand each other better? That’s what we do. And so the aim of The Practice of English Language Teaching is to share the knowledge of how good teachers think and work around the world, so that we can all help our students in the most appropriate ways possible to communicate as effectively as they can. Jeremy Harmer Cambridge, UK A note on references: References to articles mentioned in the text are found in the bibliography on pages 426-437. There are chapter notes at the end of most chapters with suggestions for further reading. 1 1 The world of English language teaching TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) is not one single profession. There are many different ways to teach English and places where it is taught – from the general English of many school classrooms around the world, to the more specialised worlds of business English or English for academic purposes (EAP). And the language itself is not one ‘thing’ either; constantly evolving and being used in more and more diverse situations, it challenges English language teachers (and course designers) to make decisions about what kind of English to teach and, of course, how to do it. 1.1 Who speaks English? It is likely that there was a time (in the early Middle Ages) when English was spoken almost exclusively by English people living in what is now England. Even then, however, there will have been outsiders who wanted to learn the language so that they could communicate with native speakers. At that time, English already constituted an amalgam of many different language strands, but the developing language didn’t stay where it had started. It migrated through conquest and trade to other countries, such as the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, the Indian subcontinent, parts of Africa and Asia and many other corners of the globe. And it didn’t stop there. It has morphed and spread to other countries and populations, too, until it has become one of the world’s main languages of international communication and commerce. Figure 1 Kachru’s three circles (figures in millions) The figure shows three concentric circles. From inner to outer circle, they represent: Inner: 320-380, Outer: 150-300, and Expanding: 100-1000. Discussions about who speaks English have been heavily influenced by the work of Braj Kachru who, more than three decades ago, proposed a ‘three circles’ view of English in the world, where the ‘inner circle’ comprised countries such as the USA, the UK, Australia, etc. These were countries where English was the national language (and the mother tongue of most of its users). Kachru suggested there were about 320-380 million English speakers of this kind (Kachru 1985). In the ‘outer circle’ Kachru included 150-300 million speakers from countries such as India and Singapore, where there was a long history of English use, and where local varieties of the language have developed. Finally, Kachru proposed an ‘expanding circle’, where English is a dominant foreign language. This expanding circle included countries as diverse as China, Sweden, Turkey and Argentina. The numbers in Kachru’s 1985 model have to be seen as informed ‘guesstimates’ rather than exact figures, partly because of the unreliability of data gathering. But one thing we can say for sure is that they are (unsurprisingly) way out of date. Two years before his ‘three circles’ article, for example, Kachru himself had written ‘One might hazard a linguistic guesshere. 2 If the spread of English continues at the current rate, by the year 2000 its non-native speakers will outnumber its native speakers’ (1983: 3). Kachru’s ‘linguistic guess’ was absolutely right, but on a much greater scale than he might have supposed. Estimates vary, but the ratio of native speakers to non-native speakers is anywhere between 1:2 (Rajagopalan 2004) and 1:5 (Graddol 2008), and this gap is widening all the time. In terms of numbers, therefore, something like a quarter of the world’s population speaks English as part of their multilingual identity, and native speakers are in a proportionately ever-decreasing minority. Of course, when we are discussing English ‘speakers’, we first have to decide what ‘speaking English’ means. If we were to include everyone who is learning English at beginner levels (as well as those who are competent speakers), we would get a very different figure from the total of people who speak English at upper-intermediate level – the B1 or B2 level (Common European Framework of Reference) or 51-67 (Global Scale of English). We will discuss these ways of describing student levels in 5.4. English sometimes seems as if it is everywhere, though in reality, of course, it is not: Graddol (2008: 207) quotes one estimated forecast of three billion ‘functional users’ of English by 2040, but this still leaves about 60 percent of the world’s population having poor or no English skills. Moreover, the English that is spoken around the world is not necessarily always the same kind of English, as we shall see – and that has implications for language teaching. 1.1.1 Varieties of English There is more than one version of English, of course. In the south of England, many people speak ‘standard southern English’ (SSE), the variety of British English which appears in many coursebooks and exams for learners of English. But if you travel north, you will find English that is clearly not standard southern English: similarly, in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, many people speak other different varieties of the same language. There are, of course, plenty of similarities of grammar, lexis and pronunciation and, in most cases, a mutual intelligibility, but there are also significant differences in terms of language construction and pragmatic use. And in England itself, different regional areas have clearly identifiable language varieties. Variation of a similar kind is found on a far bigger scale in the USA, of course. We might identify General American (GA) as a kind of US equivalent of standard southern English (Celce-Murcia 2014a: 69) – one which, like its British counterpart, is also used in teaching and examining all over the world. But anyone who has ever been to North America (or who has watched US and Canadian movies) must be aware of the many and varied regional and ethnically diverse Englishes which are present all over the North American continent. And so, even in native-speaker countries, many language varieties coexist. As we have said, teachers, exam boards and materials writers generally opt for one of two ‘inner circle’ varieties – GA or SSE – but these varieties, too, show differences of grammar (Did you see him yet?/Have you seen him yet?), vocabulary (elevator/lift, pants/trousers), pronunciation (adver tise ment vs ad ver tisement; /lɔ / vs /lɔː/ for law) and spelling (analyze/ analyse, color/colour). In most cases, though, these varieties are remarkably similar and almost always mutually understandable. Outside the ‘inner circle’ versions of English, the situation is equally fascinating. First of all, there are recognisable and well-established ‘outer circle’ varieties such as Indian or Singaporean English. Secondly, where English is becoming a language of inter-country communication in, for example, South East Asia (Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc.), it isarguable 3 that a recognisable new form of Asian English may be emerging. And finally, we need to be aware of the enormous number of speakers of English who speak it as a second or additional language (see 1.1 above), whether they themselves are Argentinian or Japanese, Italian or Mexican. The chances are that these people will not be speaking English with ‘natives’, but instead with second-language English speakers from other countries. This, incidentally, is now the reality in many large urban areas in ‘inner circle’ countries – such as London, New York, Toronto or Melbourne, for example – where a significant number of inhabitants may not have English as a home language and may be speaking to other English speakers who use a variety of different Englishes. One kind of English which receives a great deal of attention – and which reflects the reality we have been discussing – is called English as a lingua franca (ELF). This is another and more widely-used name for what is sometimes called English as an international language (EIL). ELF is English used as ‘a means of communication between people who come from different language backgrounds... not a language variety in the traditional sense of the term’ (Jenkins 2012: 487). It can be observed ‘over the internet, on Facebook, as well as in an office in Beijing, a university in Amsterdam, a market stall in Marrakesh, a bar in Milan, and a hostel in São Paulo’ (Cogo 2012: 98). One of the most noticeable features of this phenomenon is that ELF speakers seem to be very ‘accommodating’, jointly ensuring that communication is successful in a way that might horrify native-speaker examiners who demand accuracy based on native-speaker norms. Indeed, there seems to be a disconnect between the way English is frequently examined and taught (teachers – and coursebooks – tend to insist on accuracy based on native-speaker norms), and the way in which English is used by the majority of its speakers. ‘Native-speaker reference books,’ writes David Graddol, ‘may be developing as better guides to native-speaker usage, but are less useful as models for learners’ (Graddol 2008: 115). When Barbara Seidlhofer studied ELF conversations, she found a number of ‘deviations’ from native-speaker norms. Typical features of ELF speech included 1) frequent failure to use the third person singular of the present simple (e.g. She look very sad), 2) the use of the relative pronouns who and which interchangeably ( a book who, a person which), 3) adoption of all-purpose questions tags such as isn’t it? Or no? (where native speakers typically used more grammatically-based options such as He could have been more careful, couldn't he ?), and 4) the pluralising of nouns which are considered uncountable in some native-speaker varieties ( furnitures, advices) (Seidlhofer 2004: 220). Elsewhere, Jennifer Jenkins noticed that most ELF speakers do not differentiate between strong and weak forms (of words such as to, which can be pronounced /tuː/ or /tə/) and that they substitute voiced and voiceless /ð/ and /θ/ with /t/, /s/ and /d/ ( think becomes sink or tink). This may be because /ð/ and /θ/ ‘do not occur in the majority of the world’s languages’ (Jenkins 1998: 122). How should we approach this reality? Jennifer Jenkins herself suggests that teachers should not ‘correct items that are emerging as systematic and frequent in ELF communication’, and that we should ‘avoid idiomatic language’. In pronunciation teaching, she advocates that we ‘focus on the core items and leave the non-core to the learners’ choice’ (Jenkins 2004: 40). This latter suggestion has been taken up by Robin Walker in his book on teaching the pronunciation of ELF (Walker 2010). To some, it has sounded as if ELF researchers have been proposing a kind of ‘reduced’ version of English, and that this should be the target of language study – and indeed, talking about concentrating on a basic core seems to give weight to these claims. But as mostresearchers 4 insist, ELF is not so much a variety as a process of accommodation, which, though it may have some recurring features, is in constant flux as its speakers interact with each other. As most students, at some stage, need certainties to cling onto, this could present problems for teachers in deciding what language to teach. And when students ask Can you say X in English?, the response they least wish to hear is Perhaps... perhaps not, even though that would frequently be the most truthful answer! Especially when they are starting out, students will hope for a clear model, and this may include (because many learners aspire to it) a native-speaker variety of English as an ‘appropriate pedagogical model’ (Kuo 2006: 219). Perhaps, as Andy Sewell suggests, ‘adopting an ELF perspective on teaching does not mean that norms and standards are no longer required, but that these are mutable concepts and that learner need be introduced to language variation when they are ready’ (Sewell 2013: 7). Thus, teachers may well adopt any significant or functioning variety of English as the norm (in Kachru'S terms, 'inner' or 'outer circle’ varieties) to get things going, but will ensure that their students are exposed to more ELF-like language as time goes on. They might even have their students study ELF conversations to analyse the language used in them and try to work out how the same things might be said differently (Murray 2012). 1.2 Who learns English, and which variety do they learn? English is studied at schools, colleges, universities and private language institutes. For children and young adults, this is usually because English is on the curriculum, or because they need to learn it in order to study at an English-medium college or university. On the other hand, where adults make a choice to study English, they may do so for a variety of reasons. Perhaps they want to travel, perhaps they want to use social media in English, perhaps they want to get involved in online gaming or perhaps they are going to live in an English-speaking country. For many years, a distinction has been made between learning English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL). ESL learners are often immigrants to an English-speaking country and need the language in order to communicate with local people. However, they also need to know how to do things in English in that country. ESL classes, therefore, may not focus exclusively on general English (see 1.2.1), but may instead concentrate on things they need to do in the society they are living in, such as filling in a form for a driving licence or describing symptoms at a doctor’s surgery. The curriculum (and the topics and activities they take part in) may mirror the lives they are leading outside the classroom. EFL students, on the other hand, often do not have the same priorities. If they are studying in their own country, they may not need to know how to fill in a US tax form or apply for a mortgage in Australian English, for example. They may wish for a less culture-specific form of the language, and less obviously situated activities and tasks. The EFL/ESL distinction is less easy to sustain than it once was, however. In the first place, as we have seen in 1.1.1, immigrants may use their English to talk to other ESL speakers, rather than communicating with native speakers. Secondly, a lot of English takes place in cyberspace, where students may have very specific reasons for wanting to use it. Indeed, we might well think of them as internet ESL speakers because for them, the internet is an English-speaking ‘country’. In a world where English is, as we have seen, so widely used, maybe everyone is an ESL student! 5 But, of course, if immigrans to Canada are studying English in Toronto, we are likely to offer them different learning opportunities from those we offer students in Hanoi or Rio de Janeiro because, in the end, a lot will depend on why they are learning English in the first place. 1.2.1 General English and ESP General English is taught all over the world as a school subject, with no specific purpose in mind, except that language learning is thought to be good for learners, and English is a language that is Worth learning. Such teaching has been the predominant model for a long time in schools, colleges and private language schools. Typically, syllabuses for general English courses art organised in terms of the grammar and vocabulary to be taught, together with pronunciation elements and language skills work (listening, speaking, reading and writing). In general English lessons, teachers decide on what language they want to teach and then find content and activities which will help their students learn it. This is in stark contrast to syllabuses which take content (subject matter) as their starting point (see 1.2.1). However, many people do have clearly identifiable reasons for learning English. Perhaps they want to work as nurses in a hospital in an English-speaking country, or perhaps they need to learn the English that is used by pilots and air-traffic-control employees; maybe they wish to work as lawyers, or they wish to study science and technology. In this case, they will be learning English for specific purposes (ESP). Such students have a clearly defined academic, professional, learning or vocational need, and this will influence the language they study and the syllabus they follow. Experts have identified many different kinds of ESP, including EST (English for science and technology) and, importantly, for the increasing number of students who pursue tertiary education in the language, English for academic purposes (EAP). EAP students typically need to develop their skills in such areas as referencing, essay structuring, note-taking and making presentations, etc. (Strike and Tebbutt 2013). How do teachers know what to teach in an ESP course? One way of doing this is to conduct a needs analysis. Ideally, this will involve having an understanding of the situations the students are in or are likely to be in and the language events, genres (see 2.3.2) and items this involves. So, for example, David Wood, in preparing his students for work placements, analysed the language chunks and formulaic structures (see 2.5.3) that native speakers used in the workplace. In class, his students then role-played typical workplace situations (which they themselves might be involved in) where these language elements could be used (Wood 2009). In other words, what happened in the workplace determined what the teacher offered the students in their speaking lessons. In a different context, Henry Emery suggests that if we want to teach aviation English (for pilots and air-traffic controllers), we need to know the kinds of exchanges our students will be involved in. This would ideally involve teachers or course designers sitting in aeroplane cockpits or air-traffic-control towers watching, listening to (and recording) the kind of language that they need if they are to operate efficiently (and safely!) in their professional domain (Emery 2008). But however we gather our data, what is important is that we identify the type of English our students need and the situations they need it in. In the case of air-traffic control, this may involve highly idiosyncratic technical language such as: 6 Fastair 345 cleared straight in ILS approach runway 28, descend to altitude 3000 feet QNH 1011, report established on the localizer. However, aviation professionals will also need to know how to use plain and clear English, demonstrated in utterances such as There is metal debris on the runway or We are having problems with the hydraulic systems. Furthermore, in exchanges between cockpits and towers ‘it is essential... that pronunciation doesn’t impede the effective transmissions of messages’ (Emery 2008). Designers of ESP courses, then, try to pin down (through various forms of needs analysis) exactly what the students will need to do in and with the language, and this will determine the content and syllabus of the course. Good course designers find out, where they can, not only what others say is needed, but also what the students themselves say their needs and wants are because ‘learners do want and appreciate the opportunity to express their views about their course and wish to exercise some degree of control over the way the course proceeds’ (Davies 2006). However, for David Mann this is problematic because any group of students is ‘a bunch of diverse individuals with mutually contradictory notions of what [is] best for them’ (Mann 2014: 70). We might go further and suggest that what students need and what they want are not necessarily the same thing at all. The main thing to remember is that where we can identify what our students really need, and include, too, what they want, we will have clearer aims and objectives for our lessons than we sometimes do for more general contexts. 1.2.2 Business English The teaching and learning of business English (BE) is now commonplace, partly due, of course, to the role of English as a lingua franca (see 1.1.1) and its predominance in international commerce. However, as with all ESP, there are a number of issues which BE teachers and materials designers have to confront. Where, for example, do the lessons take place, and what stage of their business lives have the students reached? Some BE lessons take place at secondary school, whilst others are designed for university students of business. Some BE study takes place in-company, when teachers go to the offices where their students are working. Lessons here may involve business role-playing so that the students can put what happens in the lesson straight into practice in the workplace (see Wood above). Clearly, the content of BE lessons will depend on whether the students are studying for some future life of business or whether they are currently in work in a business environment. If the latter, we may conduct a detailed needs analysis to find out what happens in the student’s office and what that student needs to do (as we saw above). We can then tailor our lessons to those needs. Even when students are not yet in a workplace (but are intending to work in a business environment), we can find out what that environment is like, as Stephen Evans did in Hong Kong. Evans had business people keep detailed ‘week-in-the-life’ diaries, complete surveys and agree to be interviewed (Evans 2013). This allowed him to build a picture of the ways in which people in the environments he investigated wrote emails, read and wrote reports, took part in formal and informal meetings or conducted phone conversations. With this information, he could then design tasks to develop his university-level students’ ability to use English effectively in the workplace. Interestingly, Evans found that themost 7 appropriate approach for his students was task-based learning (see 4.4), where, rather than studying grammar and vocabulary in a more traditional way, they could practise engaging in purposeful communication. In reality, however, many BE coursebooks look remarkably like general English coursebooks, as Bill Reed noted in a review of many BE titles (Reed 2011). They have the same kinds of exercises as their general English equivalents, although the vocabulary and contexts reflect business environments. Which is the best approach? As with all ESP, it will depend on who the students are and what they need and want. Perhaps we will focus on language, as in many general English courses, but with added business elements, or perhaps we will allow the business content to determine the shape of our course. Having made our decision, we can plot a course on the axes of a language and business quadrant (see Figure 2). Wherever our lessons are on the diagram, though, it may be, as Phil Wade found, that business lessons ‘still worked best when the focus was on a theme’ (Wade 2012: 49). Figure 2 Balancing content and language The figure shows a horizontal and a vertical line, intersecting in the middle. On the horizontal line, on the left is More business content, and on the right is Less business content. On the vertical line, on top is More language-based, and at the bottom is Less language-based. The quadrants are marked as follows: top-left: 1, top-right: 3, bottom-left: 2, and bottom right: 4. 1.2.3 Content-based language teaching (CBLT) and CLIL Many educators, almost exclusively in school and university contexts, are interested in the teaching of content through, and with, English. This stands in stark contrast to general English teaching. The aim of language teaching is that the students will learn a language, whereas in content teaching, the content is the most important thing. When content is taught in an L2 (the target language) the idea is that the language will be learnt as well. It’s as if with content as the focus, the language comes along to join the party, and the students will learn it as it occurs. To some extent, this is similar to ESP, except that the term content-based language teaching (CBLT) is usually used to describe the study of academic subjects rather than as a way of talking about language study for a particular professional purpose. As Margaret Ann Snow shows, CBLT comes in many forms. At its most content-driven, it is likely to include total immersion, where the students do all their studies in the target language. At the other end of the spectrum – language-driven teaching – the focus is on the language, but the course includes specific content, in a more deliberate and organised way than in some general English courses (Snow 2014: 439). Entirely English-medium instruction is a form of total immersion, but in bilingual schools some teaching will take place in the students’ first language (LI) as well. There are ‘halfway houses’, too, such as theme-based language teaching, where a major organising principle for a scheme of work is content-based topics and themes (see 12.5.1). Does CBLT work? Various results suggest a high rate of achievement. For example, the immersion programmes that started in Canada in the 1960s and still go on today (where young English-speaking learners are taught for a large part of the time in French) suggest that ‘students achieve success in subject-matter learning... they achieve high levels of comprehension in French and can express themselves both orally and in writing on topics related to academic subjects’ (Lightbown 2014: 16). But there are doubts about their levelsof 8 grammatical accuracy and their pragmatic competence in French, even after many years of study. This suggests that whilst the results are very encouraging, CBLT does not seem to be a panacea for all ills. CLIL (content and language integrated learning), a European variant of CBLT, mixes the teaching of content and language so that the students learn both the content and the specific language they need to express that content at the same time. In other words, whereas in general English lessons, the syllabus selects the language to be taught and someone then looks for content to exemplify that language, in CLIL lessons, content is selected and then CLIL planners look for the precise language which will enable the students to understand and talk about that content. Thus, the students may have to learn technical words and structures that would never normally be included in a general English lesson at that level. This choice (and teaching) of language to express content is a defining characteristic of CLIL. If, for example, the students need to say things like ‘water evaporates’, then we will help them to say this. But this does not mean that we have to spend days teaching the present simple (as we might do in a general English course); instead, we may help the students with just enough of the present simple to talk about evaporation, but nothing more. In this way, the teaching of language is integrated into the teaching of the content and takes place alongside it. That is because some language in CLIL (like evaporate ) is content-obligatory language: you have to learn it if you want to talk about the content. CLIL is not just concerned with content and language, however. CLIL experts also identify three other Cs, namely communication (students have to be able to communicate content, and to be able to communicate with each other), cognition (students need to develop their thinking skills) and culture (students need to be able to relate content to the culture in which it is embedded and to be able to understand their own culture through comparison with other behavioural norms). In the area of cognition, CLIL practitioners refer to HOTS (higher order thinking skills) and LOTS (lower order thinking skills). In simple terms, a lower order type of question might be What is this? or How many of these are there? whereas a higher order kind of question might be Why is this like it is?, What causes there to be so many of these?, etc. Higher order skills are a form of critical thinking (see 5.5.7). One issue that marks CLIL out from some other approaches is the tolerance of the students’ L1 in the classroom. In some cases, content teachers can explain concepts in the students’ L1 before language teachers teach the same students how to deal with (and talk about) the content in the L2. As Sophie Ioannou-Ceorgiou suggests, ‘CLIL... respects the role that the L1 can play both in promoting and supporting L2 learning but also in creating and establishing a supportive and safe atmosphere for learners who are beginning CLIL’ (Ioannou-Georgiou 2012: 499). We will discuss attitudes to L1 use in 3.1.6. CLIL enthusiasts claim high levels of success, suggesting that students with average abilities achieve higher levels of skill than they have typically achieved in traditional classes (Dalton-Puffer 2011). Others report that teachers’ experience of CLIL has been very positive. They found that ‘the enriched content gives language learning a purpose, it is challenging and discursive, and encourages thinking skills, opinion giving and justification’ (Hunt, Neofitou and Redford 2009: 113). Just as with CBLT, in general there are varying degrees of CLIL, from entirely CLIL-centred curriculums (‘hard’ CLIL), to single lessons which are content-centred (‘soft’ CLIL). Many language teachers do a form of soft CLIL when they bring scientific or academic-flavouredcontent 9 into their lessons; but unless these lessons are driven by the content (rather than language), they may not be considered as ‘true CLIL’ at all by some. So why don’t all schools use CLIL or some other form of CBLT? Well, in the first place, and most importantly, CLIL may well demand a very special kind of teacher – someone who is equally at home with content teaching and language teaching (and has the linguistic abilities to match), and this may well imply spending a lot of time and money to train or retrain teachers from both disciplines. An alternative is to get subject teachers who work in the target language to work with language teachers. The language teacher can prepare the students for the content that they will work with, or help them with difficulties they have experienced. However, such coordination demands significant organisation, financial support and, crucially, a willingness to cooperate. Other people have worried that the L2 acts as an extra barrier to the students’ content learning, especially where teachers are not totally confident in their own L2 language use. This may have been behind the Malaysian government’s decision, in 2009, to stop the teaching of maths and science in English in Malaysian schools, or maybe it simply wasn’t possible to find enough teachers with equal levels of content and language knowledge. And perhaps it goes deeper than that. When the government of the city of Valencia in Spain abandoned the teaching of citizenship in English in 2008, it was partly in response to the crowds that filled the streets protesting against the imposition of English in this part of the curriculum. These citizenship lessons weren’t really CLIL lessons at all, but their demise points to the emotional sensitivity of teaching content in an L2. Where CLIL lessons are properly planned for and well taught, the results can be very powerful. But content-based lessons do demand different kinds of lesson planning, as we shall see in 12.6. 1.3 Who teaches English? English is taught in countries all over the world, and to students from as young as three or four right through to people in old age. Simple mathematics will tell us that there are simply not enough native-English-speaker teachers (NESTs) to meet that demand. On the contrary, in the vast majority of contexts, English is taught by non-native-English-speaker teachers (NNESTs), people who have the language as a second or additional language. And yet, despite this obvious fact, there is still, for some people, a belief that the ‘best’ teachers of a language are native speakers. This is the belief that Adrian Holliday calls native-speakerism, and which he describes as ‘a pervasive ideology within ELT, characterized by the belief that “native speaker” teachers represent a “Western culture” from which spring the ideals both of the English language and English language teaching methodology’ (2006: 385). It is certainly true that in some situations, people still seem to believe that NESTs are the ideal. Some of these people are the native-speaker teachers themselves: for example, white British teachers who rely on their ethnicity to ‘prove their efficacy’ (Mitra 2014a). But it is not just the teachers. Many students (and parents of students) have the same beliefs, and, as a result, it is still the case, in some situations, that NESTs, sometimes unqualified, can walk into jobs where they are preferred over their NNEST colleagues. 10 To many people, this perceived NEST superiority is just crazy. For a start, as Lia Kamhi-Stein points out, ‘being a native speaker of English is not the same thing as being proficient in English’ (Kamhi-Stein 2014: 566). There are native speakers of languages whose ability to use those languages is significantly inferior (or less developed) than that of some second-language speakers of those same languages. Native speakers will almost always be more fluent, but some second-language speakers may have more highly-developed vocabulary in certain areas, or an ability to discuss certain topics, such as literature or philosophy, in more depth and with greater facility. And if, as we have seen in 1.1, multilingual and non-native English users outnumber their native-speaker counterparts so significantly, it is difficult to see why those native-speaker varieties should dominate the world of English language teaching anyway. Perhaps, as David Graddol suggests, ‘native speakers may increasingly be identified as part of the problem rather than the source of a solution... as teachers, native speakers may not possess some of the skills required by bilingual speakers, such as those of translation and interpreting’ (Graddol 2008: 114) – though, of course, many NESTs speak more than one language and do make the effort to master their students’ L1. Figure 3 Pasternak and Bailey’s continua of target language proficiency and professional preparation The figure shows a horizontal and a vertical line, intersecting in the middle. On the horizontal line, on the left is Professionally prepared as a language teacher, and on the right is Not professionally prepared as a language teacher. On the vertical line, on top is Proficient in the target language, and at the bottom is Not proficient in the target language. The quadrants are marked as follows: top-left: 1, top-right: 3, bottom-left: 2, and bottom right: 4. And then there is the issue of teaching ability. Which, for example, is more important, a teacher’s proficiency in the language or their professional preparation as a language teacher? Perhaps we should describe teachers on a continuum of target-language proficiency and professional preparation (Pasternak and Bailey 2004) and forget about their ethnicity or country of origin (see Figure 3). We are not saying that there is anything ‘wrong’ with NESTs who are proficient in the language and who, through training and inherent ability, have appropriate teacher skills. Indeed, they may have some advantages – such as a linguistic confidence about their language in the classroom, which non-native-speaker teachers sometimes lack. In certain circumstances, too, a teacher’s in ability to communicate effectively in the students’ L1 (because they have only recently arrived in the country they are working in, for example) has a positive rather than a negative effect in much the same way as multilingual classes provoke inter-student communication in English. Some students like having NESTs and this can be motivating for them – even if, as we have said, there are no good reasons for this preference. Interestingly, the same students often have difficulty differentiating between native-speaker and non-native-speaker accents (Kamhi-Stein 2014). In some situations, too, professional interactions between NESTs and non-NESTs can be very beneficial (Carless 2006: 335). But in the end, the most important thing about good NESTs is that they are ‘good’ at the language and ‘good’ at teaching. Non-native-speaker teachers, however, have many advantages that their ‘native’ colleagues do not. In the first place, they have often had the same experience of learning English as their students are now having, and this gives them an instant (even if only subconscious) understanding of what their students are going through. Where they teach a group ofstudents 11 who speak their own native language, they are able to maximise the benefits of L1 and L2 use in the ways we discuss in 3.1.6 (although many primary and secondary school classes around the world are becoming increasingly multilingual, especially in urban areas). Non-NESTs are frequently considerably more familiar with local mores and learning styles than visiting native speakers are. And anyway, on the basis of numbers alone, as we have seen, they are the people delivering ELT in most cases. In the end, just like their NEST colleagues, the most important thing about good non-NESTs is that they are ‘good’ at the language and ‘good’ at teaching. The world has changed and is continuing to change. Whereas it would have been considered unthinkable even 15 years ago to have non-NESTs working in, say, private language schools in countries like the USA or the UK, nowadays many teachers in such situations do not have English as their first language, and many will have grown up in non-English-speaking families and environments. Like their students, they will have learnt English as a second or additional language. It would be difficult, then, to disagree with Suresh Canagarajah who said in a 2009 interview that: ‘The time has come for the NNEST professionals to move from the periphery of the profession to the center. It is time for us to argue that we represent the experience that is the norm for the majority of English speakers around the world – i.e. multilinguals for whom English is an additional language in their speech repertoire and identity. It is time for us to reshape pedagogy and linguistic theories to address the concerns of those who enjoy (or those who desire to develop) hybrid proficiencies and identities as we all do. The time to be defensive, apologetic and even confrontational is gone. There are no more battles to be fought. There is the serious task of living up to our responsibility of making knowledge that is relevant to the majority of people in the world – multilinguals. Perhaps that’s the label we have to start using – not non-native speakers of English but multilingual speakers of English.’ (Canagarajah 2009) For, as Graham Hall argues, the strengths of non-native speakers are ‘increasingly recognized’ and for now and in the future, ‘more attention will be given to what teachers do rather than where they are from’ (Hall 2011: 228). Chapter notes and further reading Who speaks English? Graddol has written extensively about English in the world (2008), in India (2010) and in Brazil (forthcoming). Like many other commentators, he suggests that English use may not go on growing for ever and that English as a lingua franca is or may be challenged by Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi and Spanish, for example. Varieties of English Kirkpatrick (2007) is a book about the implications of world Englishes for English language teaching. See also Celce-Murcia (2014a). 12 English as a lingua franca A must-read is Seidlhofer (2011). Prodromou offers a corpus-based analysis (2010). Dewey provides a short and cogent reply to Sewell (2013) and goes on to say that ELF research ‘promises to be especially valuable for further understanding communicative effectiveness and, provided we can overcome the constraints of a more traditional structural approach, should also prove constructive for (re)devising learning models and materials’ (Dewey 2013: 348). See also Sung (2013). ESP (English for specific purposes) A good ‘state-of-play’ article about ESP and the issues it raises (for its time) is Belcher (2006). See also Johns and Price (2014). Many teachers have their students examine authentic workplace communication through transcripts of conversations and discussions with native-speaker informants. See, for example, Crandall and Basturkmen (2004). Holmes and Riddiford (2011) have their migrant students analyse language exchanges in their workplace placements in order for them to understand ‘different social dimensions in a new sociocultural context’ (380). Lansford suggests that ‘ESP materials developers and teachers have the job of “curating reality” – turning it into something that meets the needs of the audience in much the same way that TV producers distil 24 hours of human tedium down to the half hour of entertaining antics that make for television’ (Lansford 2014: 60). Vogt and Kantelinen (2012) discuss VOLL (vocationally oriented language learning), once seen as a form of ESP, but now thought by some to be slightly different. Business English Trinder and Herles (2013) are among those who identify BELF (business English as a lingua franca) as a focus of study. Evans (2013) points out that it is frequently interspersed with the local language where a business is situated. Coulter (2014) argues for a professional standard in business English. Frendo (2005) is a book on business teaching which is still well worth reading, and there are five-minute business activities in Emmerson and Hamilton (2005). The Business English Teacher offers a range of activities and insights into the world of the BE teacher (Barton, Burkart and Sever 2010). Sharma and Barrett (2013) is an e-book which offers a wide range of business apps. Finally, Soosaar’s short article (2013: 50) describes how she has her Estonian students do 20-hour business projects in which they ‘develop and launch a new product or service, complete with marketing and advertising’. Content-based language teaching (CBLT) See Brinton, Snow and Wesche (2003) and Lightbown (2014). There is a short introduction in Hartley (2013). Barnard (2010) has some critical comments to make about content-based teaching and young learners. 13 CLIL A good introduction to CLIL is Coyle, Hood and Marsh (2010). See also Mehisto, Frigols and Marsh (2008), Harmer (2012: Units 102-110), Bentley (2010) and short articles by Spratt (2011). Gierlinger (2012) has fun making provocative statements about CLIL. For CLIL teaching activities see Deller and Price (2007) and Dale and Tanner (2012). A chapter on CLIL in Wright and Rebuffet-Broadus (2014) shows how teachers can use content and language integrated learning in experimental lessons during their training courses. Harmer (2011) is a blogpost questioning the merits of CLIL. It attracted 114 comments about its appropriateness in many different settings. CLIL and immersion Lasagabaster and Sierra (2010) argue that CLIL is a very different ‘animal’ from immersion teaching, a view echoed by Ting, who writes, ‘No matter how perfect the teacher’s English, a teacher blabbing about physics in English is not CLIL because CLIL attends to the learners’ ability to use language. CLIL thus shifts classroom dynamics away from teacher-centred lecturing to learner-centred learning’ (Ting 2011:315). However, this view is challenged by Somers and Surmont (2012). 14 2 Describing the English language It was as long ago as 1994 that Radiolinja became the first phone company to enable its phone users to send text messages to each other, and a whole new variety of language was born. People now think nothing of tapping lol (laughing out loud) or rofl (rolling on the floor laughing) or thnx (thanks) into their phones. Such abbreviations take up less space, take less time to write and also bind the texters (and their readers) together as members of the group that ‘gets it’. When texting first became widespread, there were people who became alarmed at the bad effect this might have. Children would stop being able to write or speak properly! The national language would deteriorate! Of course, precisely the opposite happened (Crystal 2008). Children and teenagers (especially) became more and more creative at using language, language abbreviations and short-cuts. Education journalist Judith Burns, reporting on research by Wood, Kemp, Waldron and Hart (2014), writes that far from having a bad effect on their language development, texting ‘can boost children’s spelling and grammar’ (Burns 2014). This is because they have to think extremely carefully about how sounds and print relate to each other, and how grammatical relations can be maintained even when the message is shortened. The history of texting is like the history of language itself. Language is always evolving and changing and while some people celebrate this, others are less sure. Texting and other more recent additions to the language would be decried by, for example, prescriptive grammarians, even if, in the end, there is nothing anyone can do to stop language change. In the world of language teaching, we should be less concerned with language tradition and more interested in pedagogic grammar – that is, what people actually say and write in different situations. Pedagogic grammar books describe the language as it is, because that is what will help students and teachers most, and that is the approach followed in this chapter (See 14.5). ‘Textspeak’ may turn out to have been a passing phenomenon, however. Because current programs no longer have word and character limits, the need for shortness and abbreviations is perhaps less urgent than it once was. 2.1 What we want to say The linguist Peter Grundy starts the most recent version of his book Doing Pragmatics (Grundy 2013) with the following exchange, where, walking along a path, he passes a mother pushing a small boy who is sitting in a pushchair with (presumably) his sister running along beside him. Grundy (referred to as ‘Me’ in the extract) then gets involved in the following exchange. Small boy: Man. Me: Is that your brother? Small girl: Yes. Me: It takes all sorts. Mother: It certainly does. 15 This is a perfectly coherent English conversation, but trying to work out what everyone in it actually means presents quite a challenge, as Peter Grundy points out. And this is not just because of the ages of the children involved, but also because establishing what the different words mean is not nearly as straightforward as it appears. When we use words, we do so for a purpose which may not be immediately apparent from a dictionary definition of those words. Consider, for example, the boy’s first utterance. He correctly identifies Peter Grundy as a man, and so we might conclude that we know what he means. But what does he mean to achieve by saying ‘man’? Is he trying to say (to his mother and sister) ‘Look, I’m really clever, I know what that thing is’? He could be trying to convey the idea that the passing man is a ‘good thing’, or, conversely, that he is horrible. Trying to work out the purpose of the boy’s utterance is, of course, complicated by the fact that he only uses one word (as many of his age do), and so we are trying to understand not only his pragmatic purpose but also the underlying grammar of what he says. What of Peter Grundy’s response (to the sister)? On one level, it is a simple question, but what is he actually trying to say? And why does he use ‘that’, referring to the boy in the third person when he is present? Perhaps he was offended by the boy’s utterance, or perhaps he is trying to create an instant bond with the girl. The fact is that understanding the surface meaning of his question is not at all the same as understanding what it is actually intended to mean and convey. The girl’s ‘Yes’ should be much easier to deal with. Everyone knows what that means, after all. But the problem is that no words have genuinely fixed meanings, and the little girl’s use of a single word may indicate nervousness about the strange man’s enquiry, irritation that he asked his question in the way he did, or a kind of nervous modesty. Grundy’s comment, ‘It takes all sorts’ is a typically British English expression which means something like ‘people vary greatly in character, and some of them are slightly eccentric or strange’. The phrase is not exclusively negative and can, in certain circumstances, be seen as an approving comment about someone’s unique character – presumably the way that Peter Grundy meant it when he made the comment (about the boy) to the children’s mother. But what about the mother’s response, ‘It certainly does’? She might be expressing agreement, in a somewhat proud way (because her little boy is somewhat eccentric). She might, on the contrary, be turning the comment back on Peter Grundy himself (that he himself seems a bit strange), or she might be saying, with feeling, something like ‘Yes, he’s a difficult little boy and I don’t know what to do with him’. As it turns out, Peter Grundy is fairly certain that the overall effect of the conversation was benign and that his (intentionally good-hearted) remark was received by the mother with amused enthusiasm. But as we have shown, many of the same words and utterances in this little conversation could have had other, less positive, purposes. The issue that faces us here is that the words we use and what they actually mean in the context we use them, are not the same thing at all. There is no one-to-one correspondence, in other words, between form and meaning. 2.1.1 Form and meaning The children’s mother, in the exchange above, could have agreed with Peter Grundy’s comment in a variety of different ways – apart from the one she chose. For example, she could have said ‘That’s very true’, or ‘I agree with that comment’ or ‘How right you are’ or 16 any number of other similar things. But she chose 'it certainly does' because she wanted to express a particular pragmatic purpose. This point is well exemplified by the different ways we have of expressing the future in English. Among the many alternatives on offer, we might say I will arrive at eight o'clock (a simple statement of fact). I'm arriving at eight o'clock (= that's the arrangement I have made). I'm going to arrive at eight o'clock (= that's my plan) or I arrive at eight o'clock (= that's on the itinerary). Each of these constructions indicate futurity, but each means something slightly different, as we have shown. If we take one of the grammatical constructions used to construct a future sentence, the present continuous ( I'm arriving at eight o'clock ), another startling phenomenon becomes apparent. In our example, the statement refers to the future, but if we say Look at John! He's laughing his head off at something , the present continuous (sometimes called progressive) is referring not to the future, but to a temporary transient present reality. A third possible meaning of the present continuous is exemplified by a sentence such as The problem with John is that he's always laughing when he should be serious , which describes a habitual, not a temporary action. And we can even use the present continuous to make a story about the past more dramatic, e,g. So I'm sitting there minding my own business when suddenly this guy comes up to me.... As we shall see in 2.5.1, this same-form-different-meanings situation is surprisingly unproblematic for competent language users since the context (situation) and co-text (lexis and grammar which surround the form, such as eight o'clock, Look at John etc.) usually resolve any ambiguity. Nevertheless, it makes decisions about what forms to teach, and what meanings to teach them with, a major factor in syllabus planning. The choice of which future form to use from the examples above will depend not only on meaning, but also on what purpose we wish to achieve, much as the mother, in her comment to Peter Grundy, chose her words for the same reasons – even though, as we saw above, we may find It difficult to interpret her meaning. 2.1.2 Purpose Many years ago, the philosopher J L Austin identified a series of verbs which he called 'performatives', that is, verbs which do what those same words mean. Thus, if a speaker says I promise , the word promise itself performs the function of promising, If a celebrity says I name this ship 'Ocean 3' , the use of the verb name performs the function of naming. The idea that language performs certain functions is not restricted to the kind of verbs Austin mentioned, however, It's cold In here might, in certain circumstances, perform the function of a request to the other person in the room to close the window. One major result of this interest in purpose was to lead linguists to propose a category of language functions, such as inviting, apologising, offering and suggesting. Thus Would you like to come for a coffee? performs the function of inviting, whereas I just can't accept that performs the function of disagreeing, with the purpose of making your own opinion quite clear. Why don't you try yoga? performs the function of strongly suggesting, where the purpose is to provoke action, and I'll do It for you is clearly offering help, with the purpose of being helpful. The study of functions and how they are realised in language has had a profound effect upon the design of language teaching materials, making language purpose a major factor in the choice of syllabus items and teaching techniques. 17 2.2 Appropriacy and register A feature of language functions is that they do not just have one linguistic realisation; the following sentences, for example, show only some of the possible ways of inviting someone to the cinema: Would you like to come to the cinema? How about coming to the cinema? D'you fancy the cinema? I was wondering if you might like to come to the cinema tonight? What about the cinema? Are you on for the cinema? Cinema tonight, yeah? There’s a good film on at the cinema. etc. Thus, when we attempt to achieve a communicative purpose (such as getting someone to accept an invitation), we have to choose which of these language forms to use. Which form, given our situation, is the most appropriate? And the same is true, of course, in our choice of language in letters, emails and text messages, where we select language according to the purpose we wish to achieve and who we are communicating with. Six of the variables which govern our choice are listed below: Setting We speak differently in offices from the way we do in cafés. We often use informal and spontaneous language at home, whereas we may use more formal pre-planned speech in an office or work environment. Participants The people involved in an exchange – whether in speech or writing – clearly affect the language being chosen. However egalitarian we may want to be, we often choose words and phrases in communication with superiors which are different from those we use when talking to, writing to or messaging our friends, members of our families or colleagues of equal status to us. Gender Some research has suggested that men and women typically use language differently when addressing either members of the same or the opposite sex, especially in conversation. This view is challenged, however, by, for example, Cameron (2007) and Fine (2011). Women may use more concessive language than men, for example, and crucially, often talk less than men in mixed-sex conversations. Channel There are marked differences between spoken and written language. But spoken language is not all the same: it is affected by the situation we are in. Are we speaking face-to-face or on the telephone? Are we speaking through a microphone to an unseen audience or standing up in a lecture hall in front of a crowd? Topic The topic we are addressing affects our lexical and grammatical choices. The words and phrases that we use when talking or writing about a wedding will be different from those we employ when the conversation turns to particle physics. The vocabulary of childbirth is different from the lexical phrases associated with football. The topic-based vocabulary we use is one of the features of register - the choices we make about what language to employ. 18 Tone Another feature of the register in which something is said or written is its tone. This includes variables such as formality and informality, politeness and impoliteness. For example, sophisticated magazines may talk of make-up, but teenage magazines sometimes call it slap. Using high pitch and exaggerated pitch movement (intonation – see 2.6.2) is often more polite than a flat monotone when saying things such as Can you repeat that? These, then, are some of the factors that influence our choice of language. When we have our students study the way language is used in speaking or writing, we will want to draw their attention to such issues. We may ask why a speaker uses particular words or expressions in a specific situation. We may have our students prepare for a speaking activity by assembling the necessary topic words and phrases. We may discuss what sort of language is appropriate in an office situation when talking to a superior – and whether the sex of the superior makes any difference. Language is a social construct as much as it is a mental ability. It is important for our students to be just as aware of this in a foreign or second language as they are in their own. 2.3 Language as text and discourse Although, as we shall see, grammar and vocabulary are vital components of language (as are the sounds of English in spoken discourse), we also need to look at language at the level of text and discourse (that is, texts which are longer than phrases or sentences). 2.3.1 Discourse organisation In order for collections of sentences or utterances to succeed effectively, the discourse needs to be organised and conducted effectively. In written English, this calls for both coherence and cohesion. For a text to be coherent, it needs to be in the right order – or at least in an order that makes sense. For example, if we take a paragraph from the book Teacher Man by Frank McCourt and put the sentences in the wrong order, the paragraph becomes incoherent: At the end I wondered how I lasted that long. On the second day I was almost fired for mentioning the possibility of friendship with a sheep. I often doubted if I should be there at all. On the first day of my teaching career, I was almost fired for eating the sandwich of a high school boy. Otherwise there was nothing remarkable about my thirty years in the high school classrooms of New York City. But if we read the sentences in the order McCourt originally wrote them (4, 2, 5, 3, 1), the paragraph makes sense, and its internal logic – the coherent way the author sets out his thoughts – becomes clear. However coherent a text is, however, it will not work unless it has internal cohesion. The elements in that text must cohere or stick to each other successfully to help us navigate our way around the stretch of discourse. One way of achieving this is through lexical cohesion, and a way of ensuring lexical cohesion is through the repetition of words and phrases (in the paragraph from Teacher Man above, first day, second day/fired, fired/high school, high school, etc.). We can also use interrelated words and meanings (or lexical set chains) to bind a text together ( teaching, boy, high school, classrooms in the paragraph above). 19 Grammatical cohesion is achieved in a number of ways. One of the most common is the concept of anaphoric reference, where we use pronouns, for example, to refer back to things that have already been mentioned, as in the following example (where his refers back to Frank McCourt, and it refers back to his book Angela’s Ashes): Frank McCourt first emerged on the literary scene with his book Angela's Ashes, a memoir of a childhood lived in poverty. It became an instant classic. Another similar cohesive technique is that of substitution: using a phrase to refer to something we have already written. The last two sentences in the paragraph from Teacher Man above (when in the correct sequence) are I often doubted if I should be there at all. At the end I wondered how I lasted that long. In the first sentence, the word there refers back to (and substitutes for) the high school classrooms of New York City, mentioned in an earlier sentence, whereas that long refers back to thirty years, which occurred earlier on. Grammatical cohesion is also achieved by tense agreement; if the writer is constantly changing tense, it will make the text difficult to follow. Writers also use linkers, such as and, also, moreover (to show an additional point), however, on the other hand, but (to indicate contrast) or first, then, later (to show sequencing in time). These features are also present in spoken language, which shows many examples of ellipsis (where words from a written-grammar version of an utterance are missed out without compromising the meaning of what is being said). The following two lines, for example, were spoken in a British pub: A: Another round? B: Might as well. Another round? is probably an elliptical version of the question Shall we have another round? (a round is an order of drinks for everyone in the group), and Might as well is an elliptical version of the sentence We might as well have another round. For conversational discourse to be successful, the participants have to know how to organise the events in it. They need to know, for example, how and when to take turns, that is, when to interrupt, when to show they want to continue speaking or when they are happy to ‘give the floor’ to someone else. In order to do this successfully, they need to be able to use discourse markers effectively. These are the spoken equivalent of the linkers we discussed previously. Thus, phrases such as anyway, moving on and right are ways of beginning a new thread of the discussion (or sometimes of closing one down); D’you know what I mean? OK? and Right? are ways of encouraging a listener’s agreement and Yeah..., But... and OK... (said with doubtful intonation) are ways of indicating doubt or disagreement. Finally, in order for conversations to proceed successfully, we need to be sure that the participants are ‘playing the game according to the same rules’ (Thornbury 2005a: 17). Thus, for example, if speaker A asks a question, he or she expects speaker B to give an answer. This example of cooperation is at the heart of the cooperative principle (Grice 1975) which states that speakers should 1) make their contribution as informative as required, 2) make their contribution true, 3) make their contribution relevant, and 4) avoid obscurity and ambiguity – and be brief and orderly. Of course, these characteristics are not always present and, as Scott Thornbury points out, we frequently excuse ourselves for disobeying these maximswith 20 phrases such as At the risk of simplifying things,... or I may be wrong, but I think... (Thornbury 2005a: 18). One other factor in successful spoken discourse is the way speakers use intonation. We will discuss this in 2.6.2. 2.3.2 Genre One of the reasons we can communicate successfully, especially in writing, is because we have some understanding of genre. One way of describing this – and one much favoured by people who teach ESP (see 1.2.1) – is to say that a genre is a type of written organisation and layout (such as an advertisement, a letter, a poem, a magazine article, etc.) which will be instantly recognised for what it is by members of a discourse community, that is, any group of people who share the same language customs and norms. Most people would recognise the following as a poem: The leaves are falling Winter love breaks loose and frail Two bare twigs remain And some people will instantly recognise that it has at least some of the characteristics of a haiku (a short Japanese verse form of – in the western realisation – three lines of five, seven and five syllables in which two elements are joined. How will they know that? Because they have seen haiku before – because they are, in a sense, members of the haiku community. However, most people who are members of a wider ‘poetry-in-general’ community will know that haiku are just one sub-genre of the poetry genre, which also includes such sub-genres as sonnets, nonnets, odes, villanelles, etc. Each one of these has its own rules, customs and identities (as the haiku does), so that if we want to write, say, a sonnet, we will have to write a 14-line poem, in two stanzas of eight and six lines, with a particular rhyme structure. An email that starts with Dear Shengmei Wang, Thank you for registering for our annual conference. Your registration will be processed as soon as possible... is clearly an official communication. We know this because it 1) has well-formed grammatical sentences, 2) uses passive constructions (i.e. your registration form will be processed), 3) has a formal greeting which includes both family and given names. The communication works because in almost no time, Shengmei (the recipient) will realise that this is an official email, and it will have done its job. She will recognise this because she has received communications of this type in English before. But, as with poetry, there are many other email sub-genres that we could have looked at, from more informal friend-to-friend communications, to emails which ask us to do something, emails of invitation, etc. Finally, the following (type of) advertisement will be familiar to many readers of this book. The advertisement is successful because anyone who looks at it will instantly know what it is. The headline Senior Teacher/Coordinator tells us exactly what to expect. The advertisement then states We are looking for... You will be responsible for... This position is open to.... The beauty of this format is that we could easily – if we were in charge of a language school -write our own advertisement, using precisely the same layout, process and structures and be sure that our advertisement would be effective. 21 Senior Teacher/Coordinator We are looking for a senior teacher to join our language school in one of Argentina’s main cities. You will be responsible for teacher development. You will also be the main point of contact for students and/or parents. You should be passionate about teaching and also be able to work with an enthusiastic small team of teachers. This position is open to teachers with a CELTA and preferably the YL extension – or CELT-P. If you are looking for the next step in your career, this is the job for you. Once again, it is worth remembering that there are many different advertisement subgenres of which this job advertisement is just one. It is similar to, but also different from, a lonely-hearts advertisement, a car advertisement, or an advertisement for property. In each case, we would be able to discover the way that such sub-genres are constructed and the register that they use. Textual success (our ability to write texts that do the job we want them to do) often depends on the familiarity of text forms for writers and readers of the discourse community we are writing for, however small or large that community might be. And so, when we teach our students how to make oral presentations, write emails, blogs – or even, in some contexts, letters – or to produce language in any other kind of recognisable genre, we will want them to be aware of the genre norms and constraints which are involved in these types of writing and speaking. Once they have absorbed this information, we can expect them to be able to write or speak in that genre using formats, layouts and language in the way the genre suggests. However, there’s a danger here, too. We need to make sure that we are not promoting straightforward imitation (even though that may occasionally have its place, as we saw in the advertisement example above) but, instead, making the students aware of the possibilities and opportunities. One way of doing this is to show them a variety of texts within a genre, rather than asking for slavish imitation of just one type. We will return to this issue in 20.2.2. Whatever text we are constructing or co-constructing (as in a conversation, for example, where speakers together make the conversation work), the sentences and utterances we use are a combination of grammar, morphology, lexis and, in the case of speaking, sounds – and it is to these elements of language that we will now turn. 2.4 Grammar The sentence I will arrive at around eight o’clock (see 2.1.1) depends for its success on the fact that the words are in the right order. We could not say, for example */ arrive will at eight o’clock around (* denotes an incorrect utterance) because auxiliary verbs (e.g. will) always come before main verbs (e.g. arrive) in affirmative sentences. Nor can the modifying adverb around come after the time adverbial at eight o’clock, since its correct position is after at 22 and before eight o’clock. There is a system of rules, in other words, which says which order different elements can go in. We call this system syntax. Grammar is not just concerned with syntax, however. The way words are formed – and can change their form in order to express different meanings – is also at the heart of grammatical knowledge. Thus, for example, we can modify the form arrive by adding -d to make arrived, so that the verb now refers to the past. If we replace e with -ing to make the form arriving, the verb now indicates continuity. We call the study of this kind of word formation morphology. Speakers of a language have a good knowledge of morphology, for if they did not, they would not be able to say I arrive, but then change this to he arrives. They would not be able to use the different forms of the verb take [take, took, taken) without such knowledge, or be able to manipulate a word such as happy (adjective) so that it becomes an adverb [happily), a noun [happiness), or has an opposite meaning [unhappy). Grammar can thus be partly seen as a knowledge of what words can go where and what form these words should take. Studying grammar means knowing how different grammatical elements can be strung together to make chains of words. The following diagram shows how the same order of elements can be followed even if we change the actual words used and alter their morphology. I will arrive at around eight o’clock. They didn’t until last Tuesday. She is arriving in exactly two hours. 2.4.1 Choosing words for grammar In order to fill the cells in the table above (i.e. string the grammatical elements together appropriately), we need to know which words (or forms of words) can be put in those cells. For example, in the last line we couldn’t put a noun in the second cell [*She nothing arriving) and we couldn’t put an adjective in the last cell [*in exactly happy). They just don’t fit. As a result, we choose words that are allowable. And this will often depend on the words themselves

English Language Teaching Practice PDF

Document Details

Tags

Related

Summary

Full Transcript

Upgrade to continue